


quite psychosomatic

by thedevilbites



Series: and other oddities [1]
Category: Alice in Wonderland (Movies - Burton)
Genre: Alice has a perfectly normal talk with a sentient tongue, Conversations with living breathing muscles, F/M, I am not sorry, Other, The Caterpillar (Mentioned), Tongue is pretty lewd ew, Unresolved Sexual Tension, confusion ensues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:27:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27039466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilbites/pseuds/thedevilbites
Summary: Perhaps it’s more of an eel than a lamprey.
Relationships: Alice/Mad Hatter, Tarrant Hightopp/Alice Kingsleigh
Series: and other oddities [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1973473
Comments: 7
Kudos: 28





	quite psychosomatic

**Author's Note:**

> alternatively, Alice finds her back to Wonderland

The tongue lolls out of a mouth, boneless, like a lamprey. It lifts itself from the mouth’s bottom lip, and gives her a languid, decidedly sluggish, onceover. Then it winks at her.

Alice decides she doesn’t quite like this dream.

“I don’t like it here,” she announces, impulsively, to the tongue, crossing her arms over her chest.

The tongue stretches further out of the mouth, swaying in the air, as if shaking its head, and snickers at her.

“Where do you think you are, dearie?”

Alice looks around vaguely. She’s certain that she sees _something,_ she just can’t quite remember what. Besides, there are more pressing matters at hand. 

She frowns, and turns back to the tongue. “I don’t quite care for your tone.”

The tongue eyes her curiously. Then it scoffs, only mildly affronted. “What tone would you rather I adopt?”

Alice thinks this over. “Something more gentle, perhaps.”

“Well, my girl,” the tongue cackles, “you won’t be getting much of that here, I can tell you that.” Its body seems to elongate with each word, slithering out of the mouth with ease. Alice stares at lips and a nose and a trickle of leftover spittle. 

She suddenly has the Urge to gag. The Urge is pressing. It tangos with her uvula. It does not like to be ignored.

A minute passes. Alice hopes a minute is still a minute, even if this is a Dream. 

She firmly tells the contents of her mouth that the party is over. The Urge slinks away. 

She turns back to the slithering offender. It’s longer than she originally thought. Perhaps it’s more of an eel than a lamprey. 

Alice waits and she taps her foot and she stares at spongy pinkness. It looks soft and fleshy and certainly malleable. Like it would flatten and squish and ooze something warm and gooey if someone put pressure on it.

She wants to hear her pearly whites go _click,_ wants to crunch and chew and tear at the slimy mucosa. Wants to see the tiny bumps disintegrate under her weight, fester and run like soup down her gullet. It wouldn’t be that strange, would it?

“I hear in some cultures women actually eat the placenta after giving birth,” Alice comments airily. She means to reassure herself. It isn’t everyday when one fantasizes about ingesting a fleshy conglomeration of eight distinct muscles.

It does not come across as reassuring.

The tongue blinks at her. Alice does not know if eels can blink, or lampreys, for that matter, but this one seems to do so very well. 

She’s never seen something blink with no eyes, though. Curiouser and curiouser. 

Someone opens up a door in her head. Or, a key was placed into a keyhole and subsequently turned. Most doors that are closed in the brain are locked. They are locked for good reason.

Since this is a dream, however, Alice thinks it’s quite alright to unlock this one. She forgets about the door the second the Thought waltzes through it.

“You said,” she begins, addressing the tongue who has since twisted itself into a knot, and is appraising her upside down, “that you can tell me that.”

“What are you prattling on about, my dear?”

“Before, you said: _you won’t be getting much of that here, I can tell you that.”_

If the tongue is nonplussed by her impersonation, it does not show it. “Indeed, I did say that.”

“So, what have you got to tell me?”

“I didn’t say I _had_ anything to tell you. I said that I _could.”_

“You mean you _can.”_

“Right.”

“Will you?”

“ _Can_ I?”

“You could, if you wanted to, I’m certain.”

“Certainly,” the tongue nods. It has managed to un-knot itself, the way that all tongues do, through trial and error. 

“I’m ready.”

“Splendid.”

The tongue says nothing. 

Alice clenches and unclenches her jaw.

Time stretches past her like a particularly sticky, gravity-defying strand of tree sap. As he passes, Time waves ‘hello’ to her, and tips his standard-issue bowler hat like a true gentleman.

Alice watches Time leave with something akin to mild disappointment. “You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”

“It appears that way, doesn’t it?”

“But I’ve got questions.”

“We’ve all got questions, dearie.”

“Yes, but the difference is that you know your Answers. I’m not even remotely acquainted with my Answers.” 

The tongue thinks on this a little. “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” it acquiesces, “I believe your Answers had a rather sensible affair with a Lie and ran away a couple centuries ago.”

Alice sighs. She understands running away. She wishes she didn’t. Life rarely bends to people’s wishes, though, so she supposes there isn’t anything she can do about it now.

She’s stuck, then.

“I’m stuck,” she informs the tongue, trying not to sound too childish, although she isn’t very concerned about her current predicament. Her future seems hazy and sluggish, like muddy swamp water. She does not really think on it, and the Dream allows it. Dreams are generous like that. 

“Well, seeing as you don’t have an Answer, I suppose I can just ask you a question.”

“Is it a difficult one?”

The tongue curls its mouth lasciviously at her. It smirks and shivers, vibrating like a tightening screw. “You’ll never know until I ask, my dear.”

Alice feels its eyes and ears crawling into her body. 

“Stop that,” she scowls, and flinches abruptly as the eyes and ears make a hasty retreat. 

The tongue stares at her with eyeless eyes. It does not apologize. She expects it to.

“Ask the question.” Alice straightens, and tries to make her voice sound like minted steel, just like her father’s. Her mother’s voice was more of a slurred copper. 

“Why,” the tongue begins, “is a raven like a writing desk?”

And Alice—Alice forgets how to _breathe._ Her lungs have temporary amnesia. They took a vacation. She stutters and stampers and _gasps_ on nothing. 

The tongue is still staring at her. She didn’t know tongues could be so lewd, but—

Alice fights the urge to fidget. Or blush. She feels both like a lady, and astoundedly un-ladylike at the same time. She pictures her mother, the black lace trimmings stitched along her neckline and onto the hems of her sleeves, accessories to the makings of a proper lady. Keyword proper. Sitting daintily in the upper-crust of society, hands folded in her lap like a graceful question mark. 

But Alice is the _antithesis_ of her mother. The waiting-ladies and butlers of the house had often said as much, at least. _Poor, sweet Alice, she’s proper mad, that one,_ they’d whisper quietly in the kitchens when they thought she’d gone to bed. _Always so utterly volatile. Mercurial. Inconsistent._

She runs her tongue over the planes of her front teeth, feels the smooth ridges stretch out in neat, continuous lines like clockwork. _Mercurial._

She narrows her eyes, lifts her chin up. It’s her dream after all, she can take control if she wishes.

Meanwhile, the tongue is ostensibly at-ease. “Surely now you have an Answer,” it lilts, bending down to glare at her. Alice thinks of wire-thin, half-moon spectacles and haughty premonitions and shades of blue.

She looks up at it rather confidently. “Are you a caterpillar?”

“Do I _look_ like a caterpillar, dear?”

“No, but you remind me of a friend I used to have.”

 _“Used_ to?”

“Well, yes,” she says with a frown. She hasn’t really thought about the caterpillar in quite some time. “I’m not sure where he is at the moment,” she muses.

“Are you saying you’re in need of a friend, then?”

“Perhaps.”

“It certainly looks that way, from where I’m standing.”

She cocks her head. “Tongues can’t stand.”

“I thought I was a caterpillar.”

“I told you that you weren’t.”

“On the contrary, you told me I didn’t _look_ like one.”

“Well, you don’t.”

“Don’t I?”

Alice narrows her eyes. Shakes her head. “Surely.”

“If you say I am not a caterpillar, then I suppose I’ll have to settle with being something else.”

“Settle on being a tongue, then.”

The tongue shrugs, the movement rushed and foreign. Alice suppresses a shiver. 

The tongue looks up suddenly. “Didn’t you think that I was a caterpillar?”

Alice finds this last comment terribly disconcerting. “Do you have amnesia?”

“No. But you _did_ think I was a caterpillar.”

“I used to, yes.”

The tongue pauses. “You _used_ to have a lot of things, it seems,” it croons, and seems horridly overdramatic, even for a tongue, when it asks, “Where have they gone, I wonder?”

“Where has what gone?”

_“Who.”_

“Pardon?”

“You wish to ask me: _where has who gone.”_

“My head hurts,” Alice scowls, and adds, as an afterthought, “and I don’t wish to ask you anything.”

“You’ve gone ahead and asked, though, even if you did not intend to.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“Go on and tell me, then. It’s no use keeping me in the Dark.”

The tongue could say a number of things here. For starters, there were many uses for keeping Alice in the Dark. The tongue couldn’t list the reasons off the top of its head. But there were reasons, nevertheless. Besides, Darkness was not an evil creature. Merely, it was often terribly misunderstood. Even the tongue misunderstood it, sometimes. 

The tongue peers at Alice askance, and says as much.

Alice—hesitates. She clicks her teeth. She—she feels like she’s missing something important, something untimely and decidedly _monumental._ Another Thought walks through the forest of her brain. 

She purses her lips elegantly. 

“I wish to speak to the Hatter.”

The tongue pauses. Then it _beams_ at her, toothless teeth and eyeless eyes blossoming in a halo of light, like it was waiting for _something_ and this is _it._

Alice shields her eyes, hand to her face as if she’s back home, stepping out of the house behind Mother, squinting up at the fervent morning sun.

This light seems brighter than any sun she’s seen before. Alice wonders how many suns there are, if any, in this dream. 

And then the tongue is pulsating and contracting and contorting, spongy body _scintillating_ and Alice can’t help but lean forward, dizzy, watches it writhe through the triangles of space between her fingers. 

She’s enamored. Her teeth _itch._ She feels like she’s sea-sick. A little unsteady, a little off-kilter, a little teetering tottering twisting winding _dipping_ —

There’s a Light. It’s blinding, as Light commonly tends to be, like the white _flash_ of an old polaroid camera snapping her vision in two.

In two. In three. Ten. Twelve. No, that’s undeniably _wrong_ because all Alice can see is _thirty two._ Thirty two teeth, glaringly, expectantly white, and stifling in their permanence, as teeth usually are. 

Then there’s lips. The lips, though—the lips are _stained._ Lacquered with a shade of happily parading red corpuscles, and Alice _knows,_ suddenly, she knows knows _knows_ who she’s looking at—

The Hatter does not wait for Alice to say his name, for that is naturally what would come next in this scenario.

Instead, he turns to her, grinning, eyes aflame, skin glowing in ways that it should not.

Alice, predictably, takes a step back.

Hatter’s grin widens. 

“Welcome back, Alice.” He gestures animatedly behind him at an ever-expanding forest devoid of life, save for the trees and the roots and ever-present ecosystem of bacteria huddled deep within.

Then he _winks_ at her. Alice blushes. She’s cold and hot all at once. _Polarized._ A magnet. 

Hatter turns on his heel, and takes a step closer.

“We’ve all been anxiously awaiting your arrival,” he sing-songs, and gives her a little three-fingered wave.

It’s odd. _He’s_ odd.

Alice would expect nothing less from Wonderland.

**Author's Note:**

> well. that happened. i'm certainly not sorry. 
> 
> *cue obsessively biting fingernails as an expression of overwhelming interior guilt"


End file.
